Takeaway: Understanding your attachment style is a useful start. Becoming more emotionally secure requires learning, through experience, that you can feel insecure and still behave differently.
Attachment theory has become something of a national hobby. People who couldn’t tell you what they had for lunch last Sunday can confidently explain that they’re anxiously attached, their partner is dismissive-avoidant, and their last relationship was a textbook example of the anxious-avoidant trap.
Social media has turned a sophisticated psychological theory into something that resembles a cheap personality test. We have attachment quizzes, attachment coaches, and an endless supply of YouTube and TikTok videos explaining why your boyfriend hasn’t texted you back. Some of it is genuinely useful. Some of it is astrology with better credentials.
The popularity of attachment theory is understandable. Most of us have experienced relationships in which our emotional reactions seemed disproportionate to what was actually happening. A delayed text feels like rejection, a disagreement triggers panic, or a partner’s request for intimacy produces an overwhelming desire to disappear. Attachment theory gives these reactions a context and helps explain why people who desperately want to be loved sometimes behave in ways that make love more difficult.
But somewhere along the way, people have started confusing understanding our emotional patterns with changing them. And knowing why we behave a certain way doesn’t necessarily make us behave any differently.
Your attachment style isn’t your personality
Attachment theory originated with British psychiatrist John Bowlby, who proposed that our early relationships with caregivers shape our expectations of intimacy, safety, and emotional availability. Children who experience reasonably consistent care tend to develop a basic expectation that others can be trusted, while those whose early relationships are inconsistent, rejecting, or frightening may develop different strategies for managing emotional insecurity.
These strategies can follow us into adulthood. An anxiously attached person may become hypervigilant to signs of rejection, constantly seeking reassurance and struggling with uncertainty. Someone with avoidant tendencies may respond to emotional discomfort by withdrawing, minimizing their needs, or keeping partners at a safe distance.
Both are trying to achieve something perfectly reasonable: emotional safety. Unfortunately, the strategies they employ often produce the opposite result.
But attachment styles aren’t persistent personality traits. They’re patterns of expectations, emotional responses, and behaviors that can vary across relationships and change over time. There’s an important difference between saying, “I tend to become anxious when I feel someone pulling away,” and declaring, “I’m anxiously attached.” The first describes a reaction you can examine and potentially change. The second risks becoming an identity, and identities have a way of defending themselves.
Once someone begins thinking of themselves as an anxious or avoidant person, they may start interpreting every relationship difficulty through that particular lens. Their partner needs an evening alone? Avoidant. They want to discuss something that’s bothering them? Anxious. Neither wants to visit the in-laws? Probably a complicated case of disorganized attachment.
The danger is that a psychological framework designed to help us understand ourselves becomes a convenient explanation for why we can’t change.
Behavioral change comes before understanding
In her recent book Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment, psychologist Marisa Franco explores why people can be loved, appreciated, and successful yet continue to feel fundamentally unworthy.
Franco argues that our sense of worth isn’t determined solely by what we consciously believe about ourselves. It also reflects emotional learning accumulated through earlier relationships. Someone who experienced rejection or emotional neglect may develop a persistent expectation of abandonment that doesn’t simply disappear when they enter a loving relationship. They may know intellectually that their partner loves them while remaining emotionally convinced that the relationship is about to collapse.
Franco emphasizes the importance of changing these deeply learned emotional expectations rather than relying exclusively on positive thinking or reassurance. There’s considerable merit in that argument, and it’s something psychodynamic therapists have recognized for decades: intellectual insight doesn’t automatically produce emotional change.
As therapists, we regularly encounter people who understand their problems remarkably well. They can explain their family dynamics, identify their defenses, describe their childhood wounds, and recognize the origins of their anxieties. Some could probably deliver an excellent lecture on their own psychopathology. Yet they continue to pursue unavailable partners, withdraw when intimacy becomes uncomfortable, or interpret minor disagreements as evidence that they’re about to be abandoned.
Their insight is genuine. It just hasn’t translated into change.
But I think there’s another part of the story that deserves more attention. We don’t always need to change our emotional expectations before changing our behavior. Sometimes changing our behavior is precisely how those expectations begin to change.
Why insecurity keeps reproducing itself
One of the more interesting features of insecure attachment is that the strategies people use to protect themselves often perpetuate the insecurity they’re trying to escape.
Consider someone with anxious attachment whose partner doesn’t respond to a message for several hours. They begin imagining possible explanations. Perhaps their partner is losing interest, perhaps they’ve done something wrong, perhaps the relationship is in trouble. As anxiety builds, they send another message, then another, and eventually call. When their partner finally responds with reassurance, the anxiety subsides.
The immediate relief reinforces the strategy. The person learns that uncertainty is something they need to eliminate quickly, usually by obtaining reassurance from someone else. What they haven’t learned is that uncertainty itself is tolerable. Over time, the reassurance-seeking may also leave their partner feeling monitored or pressured, increasing tension in the relationship.
Avoidant attachment often follows a different version of the same pattern. When a partner wants to discuss a difficult emotional issue, the avoidantly attached person may feel overwhelmed, criticized, or trapped. They withdraw, become silent, change the subject, or convince themselves that their partner is simply too demanding.
Withdrawal reduces their immediate discomfort, but it also prevents them from discovering that emotional closeness and disagreement can be managed without losing their autonomy. Meanwhile, their partner may become increasingly frustrated and demanding, reinforcing the avoidant person’s belief that intimacy is suffocating.
Two people can spend years confirming each other’s worst expectations while sincerely believing they’re only trying to protect themselves. Neither is necessarily malicious. Both are responding to perceived threats, using strategies that may have made sense at some point in their lives but no longer serve them particularly well.
You don’t have to feel secure to behave differently
Much contemporary self-help literature emphasizes healing childhood wounds, developing self-compassion, and learning to feel worthy of love. These can be valuable therapeutic goals, but there’s a subtle assumption running through some of this advice: that we must first achieve a certain emotional state before we can begin behaving differently.
First heal your abandonment wound, then you’ll stop seeking reassurance. First develop self-worth, then you’ll establish healthy boundaries. First become emotionally secure, then you’ll be ready for a healthy relationship.
Psychological change doesn’t always follow that sequence.
In cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), we often work in the opposite direction. Someone who fears social rejection doesn’t necessarily overcome that fear by convincing themselves that everyone will like them. They gradually engage in social situations, tolerate discomfort, and discover that rejection is less catastrophic than they anticipated. Someone who struggles to assert themselves doesn’t need to feel completely confident before saying no. Confidence often develops through the experience of asserting themselves and discovering that they can handle the consequences.
The same principle applies to attachment. An anxiously attached person can learn to tolerate a delayed response without repeatedly checking their phone, while an avoidantly attached person can practice remaining engaged in a difficult conversation rather than disappearing emotionally. Neither needs to feel comfortable doing so at first.
Our brains update expectations through experience, particularly when something happens differently from what we anticipated. By responding differently to familiar situations, we create opportunities for new emotional learning.
Of course, this doesn’t mean ignoring genuine warning signs or forcing ourselves to tolerate unhealthy relationships. Sometimes anxiety is telling us something important, and sometimes distance is the appropriate response. The challenge is learning to distinguish between an actual problem in the relationship and an old protective response that has become automatic.
Security is something we practice
We tend to describe secure attachment as a psychological state: feeling confident, trusting others, being comfortable with intimacy, and not constantly worrying about abandonment. But security is also expressed through ordinary behaviors.
Securely attached people aren’t necessarily free from jealousy, insecurity, anger, or fear. They generally have a greater capacity to manage these experiences without allowing them to dominate their relationships. They can express their needs without demanding that their partner immediately resolve every uncomfortable feeling, tolerate disagreement without interpreting it as a threat, and remain emotionally available while respecting their own boundaries.
These capacities can be practiced in surprisingly ordinary situations.
Someone with anxious tendencies might begin by allowing uncertainty to exist without immediately seeking reassurance. When their partner doesn’t respond to a message, they acknowledge the anxiety without automatically treating it as evidence that something is wrong.
Someone with avoidant tendencies might learn to recognize when they’re becoming overwhelmed and explain that they need a little time before returning to a difficult conversation, rather than simply shutting down.
Someone who struggles to express their needs might begin by asking directly for something small, not because they’re certain the answer will be yes, but because they need to discover that having needs doesn’t make them weak, demanding, or unlovable.
Nobody is going to write a bestselling memoir about learning not to send a fourth text message. But these small behavioral changes, repeated over time, can alter both the emotional climate of a relationship and our expectations of ourselves.
Every time we learn to tolerate uncertainty, express a need, establish a boundary, or remain present during discomfort, we gain experience managing situations we once found threatening. We begin to trust our capacity to cope, even when other people don’t behave exactly as we’d like.
Understanding the past without becoming trapped in it
None of this means childhood experiences are irrelevant or that attachment difficulties can always be overcome through a few behavioral exercises. Some people carry profound histories of neglect, abuse, or relational trauma, and their emotional responses may require substantial therapeutic work.
Exploring the past can help people understand why certain situations feel so threatening. A good therapeutic relationship can also provide experiences of consistency, acceptance, and emotional safety that were previously missing.
The point is that insight, emotional processing, and behavioral change are interconnected processes rather than obligatory stages in a fixed sequence. Sometimes understanding our past makes it easier to behave differently. Sometimes behaving differently changes how we feel about ourselves. And sometimes a new relationship can challenge expectations we didn’t even realize we had.
There’s a certain comfort in knowing why we struggle. It gives our suffering a narrative, and often a legitimate one. But explanations can also become places to hide. We may spend years examining why intimacy frightens us while avoiding the ordinary, uncomfortable work of becoming more intimate. Or we may become exceptionally knowledgeable about abandonment trauma while continuing to organize our lives around preventing anyone from ever disappointing us.
Attachment theory remains one of psychology’s most useful contributions to understanding human relationships. But attachment styles describe patterns; they don’t determine what we’re capable of becoming.
Knowing your attachment style can help you recognize what happens when you feel threatened. What matters next is how you respond. You can feel the familiar urge to pursue someone who is pulling away and choose not to chase them. You can experience the impulse to withdraw from intimacy and decide to remain engaged. You can fear rejection and still express what you need.
Secure attachment doesn’t mean never experiencing jealousy, fear, or uncertainty. Even securely attached people have bad days, difficult relationships, and moments when their emotional maturity takes an unscheduled vacation. Being securely attached means gradually developing enough trust in ourselves and others that those feelings no longer determine every decision we make.